Dead Stop (6 page)

“Hey Deke! Hey
Harley! I’ll be right with you.”

Candy Beller
finished ringing up the tab of a couple of highway patrolmen then hustled
around the desk to them. The little blonde was a bundle of energy in a constant
motion.

“I’m going off
shift here in just a minute, but I can get you drinks if you like. I’ll leave
the menus with you guys, and Stacey or Marisa can get your orders when they
come up front.” She gestured at the mostly empty diner. “Go ahead and pick your
own table.”

The only other
diners in the place were a couple of truckers sitting at the bar, a pair of
young out-of-towners at a table beside the window, and a woman he vaguely
recognized as the veterinarian, Doc Sutherland, who sat reading one of those
new e-readers in a booth against the inside wall.

Deke gave a
brief thought of asking which tables were served by which waitress, then came
up with a more elegant and less embarrassing solution. He headed for an outside
booth by the windows. Whichever girl had the inside tables would also have the
bar, and if it turned out to be Stacey he could easily move there later to talk
to her without raising a spectacle.

Pleased with
solving his first problem in this evening’s little exercise, he took his seat
and smiled up at Candy as she brought them their coffee.

“Not much
happening tonight, huh?”

“Not yet.” The
waitress set their coffees in front of them and added a pair of menus. “This
place don’t see much action on Friday nights until the football game lets
out…then it’s a madhouse.”

“Pretty crazy,
huh?”

“Yep.” She
leaned in close and lowered her voice. “That’s why I’m in a hurry to clock out
and get out of here, before Big Earl calls in and wants me to work a double
shift. It’s still a couple of hours till the game lets out though, and until
then this place will be dead as a graveyard.

###

Twilight -
Benny

“Hey girls, come
check this out!”

Benny Trujillo
held the back door of the truck stop open and motioned to the pair of girls who
were just putting on their aprons to go on shift.  He waited patiently as
Marisa and Stacy glanced at him, and then at each other. The look conveyed
their shared opinion of men and the often dubious outcomes that particular line
led to.

In his case, the
portly little janitor knew it was just habit on their part. In truth, both of
them considered him a safe, older, and married man who was fun to tease yet
trustable enough to confide in. Still, he found it slightly humorous and
flattering the habit extended towards him too.

Not that he
blamed them.

It only took one
glance for anybody to understand their job history hadn’t been the first thing
Big Earl Anderson looked at when he hired this pair. They were as different as
night and day, and quite possibly the two most smoking hot women within a
hundred miles. Both were sharp as tacks, and had turned out to be surprisingly
good workers, but there the similarities ended.

Marisa Valdez
was a tall and graceful Latina with a full mane of lustrous black hair,
expressive brown eyes, and legs seeming to stretch for miles. She moved like a
dancer through the tables, drawing admiring looks from most of the patrons…especially
after she passed. As Big Earl had once so eloquently put it, “If eyes were
lasers, that girls butt would have caught fire after only a few seconds on the
job.”

Benny had
laughed at the time, and pointed out if that had been the case then poor Stacey
would have gone up in flames as soon as she stepped into the room.

Stacey Collins
was not near as tall as Marisa and built along completely different lines. She
had short brown hair, perky features, and a bright elfish smile that lit up any
room she entered. The girl possessed an earthy, slightly redneck charm combined
with a vivacious good cheer which tended to infect the people she interacted
with. She also had what Earl once poetically described as “the most magnificent
pair of huge, natural born hooters this side of the Rocky Mountains.”

Benny had warned
Earl that hiring these two beauties and putting them on the same shift (hell,
even the same crew) was asking for trouble. He pictured the Textro turning into
a battlefield of feminine egos and seething rivalry, with the rest of the crew
caught in the middle.

As it turned
out, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

After a couple
of days of quietly sizing each other up, the two astonished everybody by
forming a tight working friendship that at times seemed to pit them against the
world. Despite their vastly different backgrounds they became a two girl team,
supporting each other with both customers and coworkers alike. After his
initial surprise—and a big helping of crow—Benny came to understand that despite
their differences the two girls realized they had a lot in common in a world
prone to dealing with them primarily on their looks.

Now they
regarded him with matched smiles of mock suspicion as he gestured towards the
door.

“You see?”
Marisa addressed Stacy while nodding towards him. “I told you he was a dirty
old man. ‘I want to show you something,’” she made little quote marks with her
fingers. “You know how that always works out. Like we’ve never seen one of
those before.”

“Maybe he meant
it like ‘Hey girls, watch this,” Stacey responded. “But those are usually more
funny than bad…especially when they wipe out and break bones.”

They both
giggled, eyes twinkling in merriment.

 “Ay yi
yi!” Benny groaned aloud, “You two are exactly like the awful daughters I was
afraid I would get, way back before I got lucky and had boys! When you’re
through giving a poor old man a hard time, you should at least come over and
see what he was trying to show you.”

“Sorry, Benny!”
the pair sing-songed together with exaggerated looks of contrition on their
faces. “We’ll be good!” They made a big show of shuffling over to him with
their heads down and hands clasped in front of them like chastened school
girls.

“Augh!” He
rolled his eyes and pointed through the open back door into the twilight. The
girls peered out in the direction he gestured,

“
Que?
”
Marisa frowned out into the gloom. The sodium vapor lamps were just beginning
to flicker on and illuminate the back parking lot under their yellow glare. “I
see the maintenance garage. And I see some trucks lined up along the back of
the lot. Aaaannnnnd I see a cornfield.”

“Oh look!”
Stacey pointed off to the south at a female figure wearing tall hair, a tube
top and hot pants, who was slowly making her way towards the line of trucks.
“It’s Libby the Lot Lizard, starting her rounds.”

“Hi Lizzie!” the
two girls sang out loudly, waving furiously at the truck stop prostitute.

Benny groaned as
the older woman stopped and glared. She snatched the cigarette out of her mouth
and snarled something incomprehensible at the waving pair before shooting them
the finger and resuming her slow walk towards the garage. The waitresses almost
collapsed in laughter, and the little janitor could only shake his head at the
strange politics of women.

“So that’s it?”
Marisa dabbed her eyes as she recovered. “You wanted to show us Libby? We’ve
seen Libby before, you know.”

“All of her,”
Stacey chimed in, “If you count those two times she got thrown out of trucks
without her clothes.”

Benny winced at
the memory, but stayed on topic…a real challenge when dealing with these two.

“No, you gooses!
I was pointing at the sky back there above the cornfield.”

“Ohhhhhhhhh….”

Both girls
looked back out the door at the western sky.

“Well, it’s
dark,” Marisa offered.

“Wait for it…”

“And it’s
getting windy.”

“Wait for the
lightning.”

“Okay, but we
need to…”

Fortunately,
right then nature decided to be kind and produced the desired illumination.
Lightning flashed and the girls both “oohed” at the scene revealed under the brooding
clouds.

The western sky
was full of birds.

Hundreds of
black silhouettes flickered as if in a strobe light as they whirled in a great
circle beneath the thundercloud. It was like a cyclone of crows, all sailing in
the dark, windy sky.

“
Hijole
!”
Marisa gasped. “What are they doing, Benny?”

“I don’t know,
chica
,”
the little janitor frowned at the sky. “I saw them earlier, before you two came
in, but they were circling way out there over the corn field. Now they’re
almost here.”

“Awesome!”
Stacey enthused. “And weird! I bet they are coming in ahead of the storm.”

Benny studied
the aerial whirlpool for a second, then gave it a bemused grimace.

“Could be,” he
shrugged. “You’d think they would go hide out in the trees at the Clark Creek,
but maybe they got other ideas.”

The two girls
watched for a few seconds longer, then glanced at each other again and then
their watches.

“Yeah, you would
think,” Marisa agreed, “but
we’ll
have to go hide out in Clark Creek if
we don’t get a move on and get to our tables.”

“Go ahead,”
Benny waved the girls back to their duties. “I’ve got to get a move on too.
Tomas wants me to hold down the kitchen for him while he goes on break and runs
some food back to Arnold and Leon.”

Marisa snorted.

“You know the
only reason he does that is so he and Leon can share a joint behind the shop,
right?”

“Not my
business,” Benny shrugged. “He just needs to work on being a little quicker
about it.”

“You’re too
nice, Benny,” the black haired girl frowned. “You need to stand up for
yourself.  Don’t let him run all over you.”

“Yeah, that’s
our job!” Stacey piped in.

“Will you two go
to work?!” the older man groaned and shooed the girls away.

After they left,
he spent a moment longer at the back door and watched the skies. Lightening
flickered within the clouds again, once more revealing the frantic aerial
whirlpool of crows. Their winged bodies swooped and swerved high overhead. Then
the lightning faded, causing the vast flock to disappear once more against the
blackening sky.

Benny frowned up
at the blackness.

Stacey was
right. It really did seem odd for birds to be cavorting out here in front of an
oncoming storm like this. He figured they should be hunting for trees to
shelter in by now. There certainly weren’t any around here.

“Then again,” he
shrugged philosophically, “what the hell do I know about birds?”

What he did know
was there was work to be done. The football game would let out soon and he had
things to get ready. So Benny decided to leave the storm and crows to sort
themselves out, and pulled the door closed behind him.

###

Twilight -
Libby

Those smart
ass little sluts!

Libby Darnell
seethed as she resumed her course towards the distant trucks at the back of the
parking lot.

Well they could
call her “Lizzie” and have their little laugh, but as far as she was concerned
those two little tramps didn’t have any damn right to look down on her. If they
thought for one minute they had been hired for their waitressing skills then
they were even dumber than they acted. They already had their feet well down
the road she had travelled and were too damn stupid to see it.

She would have
loved nothing better than to get in their snotty little faces and explain the
facts of life to them…with a little fist action involved…but she knew Big Earl
wouldn’t tolerate her laying a finger on them. And the last thing Libby wanted
to do was get crosswise with Big Earl Anderson. What she called a living
nowadays depended on having access to the Textro Truck Stop, and he could wreck
it just by forbidding her from setting foot on the place.

She didn’t dare
let that happen.

The next truck
stop this size was two counties over, and the owner there took a sizeable cut
of a working girls income…as opposed to just being willing to look the other
way in exchange for the occasional favor like Big Earl. She couldn’t afford to
relocate, and she damn sure didn’t want to be giving up any of her hard earned
money to some pimp. Not to mention, she had certain habits.  And moving
would mean having to learn a whole new group of contacts so she could get what
she needed.

So, at least for
now, the two little shitheads were safe.

For now.

Lightning
flashed, and Libby looked up to see the crows wheeling overhead. She squinted
briefly at the flying air-show before hunching her shoulders and continuing on
her way.

There had once
been a time in her life where she might have indulged in a little wonder at the
sight, but that girl was long gone. Right now her main goal was to get together
a little scratch so she could get to Conner’s Liquor to set herself up for the
weekend. And getting shit on by some stupid crow would not help her
chances. 

The prostitute
stopped at the corner of the maintenance garage to finish her cigarette and pat
her hairdo to make sure it remained bird shit free. Thankfully her hair was
still clean. The rest of her would just have to do, since she hadn’t had money
to run down to the Laundromat lately. She had chosen the little tube top and
hot pants primarily because they were small and therefore in her mind less
obviously dirty than her other clothes.

Now she wished
she had picked something else.

Libby wasn’t
terribly happy with the figure the little outfit revealed. She knew she had put
on a few pounds over the years, but tonight’s encounter with those teenage
trollops with their ridiculous young figures had served as a reminder of how
things were starting to slip. She knew her hot pants were causing her to sport
a serious muffin top these days, with a pale stomach threatening to overhang
her belt in a way she didn’t want to think about.